As you may have seen, David's been taking care of OSNews for a few days because I'm quite busy with work. Still, there's one thing I'd like to talk about: the desktop mode in Windows 8. I wish I could've added this to the first impressions article, but I only arrived at this conclusion yesterday: desktop mode in Windows 8 is Microsoft's equivalent of Mac OS X's Classic mode.

I don't think many home users are going to have any trouble with WIndows 8, since Metro and the app store is probably going to be more secure and less of a hassle than the 'classic' desktop. On the other hand, I'm sure many power and corporate users are going to hate it. Metro is obviously an environment more for grandmas and tech tards than people who need to get real work done.

There's another way to look at this. The desktop, as it currently stands, is a kind of Wild West. Apps pretty much do whatever they want, they jerk focus away from you, when you least want them to. They pop up all kinds of toasts and hook themselves into everything to alter the desktop experience. They're constantly vying to be topmost window. They are wildly inconsistent wrt UI standards. In other words, the desktop has become really lame. Metro is about restricting the UI paradigm so that the user gets to decide about how apps will get used, not the other way around. Apps can't just create multiple windows. They can't take focus away from one another. They get shoved to the background, and they stay there. They can't call certain APIs. There are restrictions on their privileges. Many geeks will see these things as unnecessary restrictions. But we've all seen what happens to the desktop when you let geeks do whatever they want: It turns into a roiling cesspool. The desktop has its place. It's primarily about content creation -- whereas Metro is about content consumption -- so there's nothing which says you have to choose between one or the other. People can simply decide which world they prefer to live in.

So I think the article's premise is right... during the transition from 'classic' to Metro, Metro will probably 'grow up' during this process, at which time most of the people who hated it in the beginning won't mind.

Agree with you on this. It's a transition.

On the other hand, if it doesn't catch on like MS hopes, just like with WPF/Silverlight, they could change they're mind again, decide to scrap Metro, and go with the new Framework of the Month. It's obvious by now that they're content to keep throwing shit against the wall until something sticks, so I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen.

I don't think so. The iPad has become a very real competitive threat to Microsoft's laptop market, and it has to make a longterm commitment to this market. I'm sure they will evolve their application model, but it seems unlikely -- given the investment in the App Store, etc -- that they will scrap it entirely.

Hrm, so, since MS can't come up with a good window manager, we should remove all window management features from the OS? How's about if, instead, we improve the window management in Windows, such that these "issues" become non-issues?